Travel Mercies Part Dy

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I Don’t Want To Travel That Way

Albania

I know that some of you may still be traveling for the Holidays. I hope everything is going smoothly, and that you have had wonderful times with your family and friends. To continue with the Travel Mercies Part Dy, which is the number two in Albanian—see you learned something new today already—I thought I would just stay in Albania for now. I have had so many amazing, crazy, scary, and death defying avenues from point A to point B in Albania alone that it could take up several pages.

     In 1994, my first summer in Albania one of our modes of transportation was to take a ferry barge up the Drin River in northern Albania. We left our base camp by Land Rover and traveled about two hours to a landing at the base of a dam. To arrive at the landing we first had to scrape through a rough cut tunnel with light bulbs strung along its walls and barely enough room for the vehicle to pass through without knocking off the side view mirrors.

     One of the first things that I noticed was that there was a pleasant breeze blowing down the river. It had been stiflingly hot in the Land Rover and had also been stifling hot at our base camp at King Zog’s old summer palace on the lake in Shiroka. So a breeze for this Kansas boy was a welcomed relief. Remember what I said about the jungle in Liberia?

     The ferry landing was a bustling enterprise with Albanian soldiers guarding the landing and the dam, and several kiosks and a café selling drinks and snacks, which by the way suddenly increased in price by three hundred percent when they found out Americans were present, and quite a large number of Albanians who were not part of our project who also were wanting to go up river. We loaded onto the ferry and found seats that were a wreck of exposed springs and patches of foam rubber with tatters of upholstery clinging stubbornly with rusted staples and twine. I am pretty sure I also saw pieces of crenated human flesh impaled on the spring barbs. But all this was part of the patina of the vessel.

     Being the back row Baptist that I had been raised to be I carefully mounted one of the so called seats in the stern compartment taking extra precaution to insure that I did not leave a token of my own flesh as a souvenir. An American named Doug, who had lived overseas all his life, passed by me as he made his way back to his seat after using the bano, or toilet, and said simply, “That goes on my bottom five list.” This amusing comment meant that the toilet on the ferry we were on, and would be for the next five hours, was one of the worst five toilets this man had every seen in the whole world. I decide to check it out for myself. I have now traveled, not as a tourist, to many parts of the world, and I still have that bano on my own personal bottom five list. Just opening the door tainted my clothing with the pungent odor of ancient, layered, human excrement. I chose at that moment to hold it for the rest of the trip.

     No one on our team could have foreseen the chaos that would ensue as the ferry began its long chug up the River Drin, and the maelstrom of unbreathable air that assaulted on the wind from that port side bano. The mass exodus to the bow area through the starboard gangway is something that I had never experienced and only witnessed in natural disaster movies. In the end the best seat in the boat was the roof of the ferry which was not meant for passengers, but hey, we were in Albania. The breeze off the river was strong and cool and breathable. Note—I used this ferry and the bano story in my novel, Vale of Shadows. Check it out at Amazon.com or bn.com, and visit my authors website at www.robdakin.com for a synopsis.

     Another time in Albania, years later, our team had to travel from a village in the plains to a village up in the mountains. We checked around and found a man who had a furgon, or van, who was willing to drive us to the mountain village the next day. As team leader I had the responsibility and privilege to sit in the front seat with the driver, who was probably about fifty to sixty years old at the time.

     We made our way slowly up the rutted, potholed, narrow road that was just barely wider than a sheep trail. Several times we were forced to make incredibly sharp turns to ascend the switchback trail. I looked out the window, remember I said you should never do that, to see the front tire slide precariously toward the abyss and certain death below. But believe it or not I remained calm because I knew that our driver was capable and competent, and he knew these roads like the back of his hand.

     At one point the furgon began to loose traction up the steep hill, so the driver put the vehicle in reverse and backed down the trail about twenty feet—we only had twenty feet one inch before we careened over the cliff—so he could take a new running start at it. The rear wheels spun, gravel and dirt sprayed the landscape, and the furgon fishtailed its way to the next plateau. At this point I looked out over the valley below and thought, This would be a lovely place to set my memorial marker. I should point out that Albanian roads are strewn with memorial markers of drivers who have found out the hard way that their automobiles could not fly, or at least had a limited flight pattern. Name, age, and dates, on a beautiful marble stone, even a photo in ceramic. Very nice.

     When we finally, and mercifully, arrived at our village I paid the driver the agreed upon amount of Lek, and we unloaded our equipment after of course we pried open our gnarled grips from the “Oh my gosh bars” that were mounted strategically about the cab. The driver shook my hand most vigorously and thanked me up and down for allowing him to bring us to the village. I asked him what he meant by that. He said, “I just got my drivers license yesterday. You were the first to let me drive. No one else in the town wanted to ride with me.”

I hope your travel arrangements are more to your liking. May God Bless you until next time!

125 thoughts on “Travel Mercies Part Dy”

  1. Rob, You are so appreciated by Kathryn and me. We love your site. Just now reading about AERO ’98 and the State Department evacuation scare, brought tears to my eyes. That was a defining moment in the ministry, Kathryn and I had just given up the ND role to Dan two months previously and we were so glad for how he led that situation.

    Any interest in coming to be with us in the Pacific for a time, like Fiji?

  2. Thanks Don, I’m glad you like the stories. We are hoping to go to Albania in May for the 20 year celebration. We hope to see you there. Yes, we would love to come to Fiji or any where else you are working in the Pacific. Let me know what you are thinking. We pray for you and your family everyday.

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